[if_by_whisky]

I used to work for an expert witness who testified on valuations in IP infringement cases. I really lost faith in the way the US handles IP infringement in that job. I know patents are contentious in tech, but sometimes I think copyright is just as bad. I know it's not a popular opinion, but seeing how things actually play out really made me feel for defendants in those cases.

Regardless of what you think of the effectiveness of IP protection, the way damages are calculated (and ultimately determined by courts) is just awful. I haven't looked at the specifics of that $65M calculation, but if the real number were closer to $650k I wouldn't be surprised-- 2 orders of magnitude was a pretty typical spread between plaintiff and defendant expert witnesses' valuations in the IP cases I worked on.

[efitz]

There is a very real cost to society to provide patent and copyright. We have to have additional law enforcement, court, and prison capacity. It’s not clear at all to me that society is getting its money worth in defending essentially rent seeking behavior from big business. It’s also not clear that either patent or copyright in their current form actually “promote progress in the useful arts”.

I hate the terms “intellectual property” and “piracy” because patent and copyright are not much like property at all, and because actual piracy is a crime of violence and nothing like infringement. And it’s not clear to me that the punishments inflicted are reasonable given the impact of the “crime”.

Given that, I believe that we would be better off without patent or copyright, or with only a very modest time period of a couple years.

[willcipriano]

It isn't 1900 anymore. With things with additive manufacturing and other innovations you can go from prototype to product faster than ever. A few year head start should be sufficient reward for most innovations. Perhaps you could handle the special cases (ie. somebody spends a billion dollars to invent a engine that runs on water) as one offs.

Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don't have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don't need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.

[ghufran_syed]

Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?

[readbeard]

In 1790, copyright term in the US was 14 years (if registered) plus 14 more years (if renewed), for a maximum total of 28 years. As of 1998, the copyright term is 95 years after publication (or 75 years after the author's death). So if creativity is equally as difficult now as it was in the past, I would ask why copyright terms have been so substantially expanded.

It's also worth pointing out that, since the vast majority of works generate almost all their profits within the first few years of publication, such a lengthy copyright term primarily benefits rights holders of the extremely elite set of works that remain popular after decades of publication. In practice, this mostly winds up being companies like Disney, Sony, Universal, and so on. Meanwhile, the group that is most directly harmed is not the public in general, but everyday artists—who are less free than they were in the past to build on previous works, remix them, or use them as supporting elements in a larger project.

Consider that, whereas consumers wanting to enjoy an older (let's say WWII-era) work usually face a choice between paying a small fee and getting an unauthorized copy somehow, creators face a choice between enduring a difficult and extremely costly licensing ordeal or opening themselves up to substantial legal risk. Creators often lose heart when faced with this dilemma—and many projects, at least a few of which would probably have been great, will never be made because of this.

[aidenn0]

Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) could not have been made until 1986[1] if the current rules were in effect (The ballet it was based on was from 1890, and copyright is 95 years).

That's my go-to example for why this entire "creators vs consumers" narrative is so bogus. Copyright today is no less of a lottery ticket than getting noticed by the Medici family was 100s of years ago.

1: In theory they could have licensed it, but I suspect a theoretical person in charge of maintaining the dignity of Tchaikovsky's works might have balked at giving Disney free reign to make a cartoon version and add lyrics for children to the instrumental music. Also, I don't think a ballet writer would feel particularly incentivized to know that someone would pay their estate to make a cartoon movie 60 years after they die.

[TheDong]

Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright's restrictions)?

In my mind, open source code has been an excellent experiment showing that eschewing copyright doesn't mean people are less creative. Certainly, I've seen more creative open source code than I've seen creative proprietary code.

Similarly, there are huge swathes of fanfiction out there which are incredible pieces of creative writing which are not charged for, are not created for commercial interest, and while technically copyrighted, the author may not even realize that.

There are masses of people producing tiktok videos and spotify music for an audience, with no explicit expectation of copyright protection.

People clearly want attribution, not control to the point where they can say that their work cannot be remixed into a new tiktok video (a common thing), or used as fuel for a new creative endeavor.

On the other hand, copyright is largely used to stop such remixing, to prevent making creative derivative use of a work. If it were used just for "you must attribute me" (what open source licenses reduce it to), I would have no complaints.

[paulmd]

> Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright's restrictions)?

Open-source code doesn't mean it's not copyrighted, and in fact copyleft licenses are explicitly designed to use this copyright as a coercive/protective mechanism the same as any other copyright.

But as a general statement, everything anyone produces is copyrighted from the moment they produce it. Your "hello world" that you write in a demo project and never open again is copyrighted. Your phone snap of your dog is copyrighted. MIT/BSD licensed code is copyrighted.

A license providing grant of permissions is not the same thing as not having a copyright. Open-source code still has an author, and that owner can also offer other licenses if they want.

[caconym_]

+1

People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight: just as quickly, their work will be published and distributed by for-profit entities who can still turn a profit on it but don't have to give them a dime. Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author, except as an employee of a corporation that also controls distribution (e.g. your Disneys, your HBOs, and so on).

I don't want to live in a world where the importance of storytelling [in media] is marginalized even further than it already is. A lot of people seem to have a "how hard could it be?" attitude toward it; the answer is, really fucking hard.

[zozbot234]

> People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight

We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

> Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author

The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed. Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

[caconym_]

> We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

Do you think differences in how stories were copied and distributed "then" vs. today might have some bearing on the question of whether the absence of copyright "then" implies that authors don't benefit from it today?

For instance, in the year 1400 AD, the cost of reproducing a written work of any significant length for mass distribution was beyond exorbitant. Today, it is essentially zero.

> The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed.

If copyright is done away with, making money on works before they're released to the public might indeed be the only way for independent authors to make money. Right now it's an alternative to self-pub that's really only available to authors who already have a large established following, e.g. Brandon Sanderson; if people can just wait for you to finish and get the work for free, I doubt they're going to put money up front before you've even finished it unless they're already big fans of your work.

So---in short---no, I don't think the Kickstarter model will protect most independent authors from the effects of a dissolution of copyright law. But I welcome any challenges to the above reasoning.

> Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

What's the relevance of this bitter little nugget? Somebody who has written something is perfectly free to release it to the public domain if they like, and indeed many authors do just that. They are not bound to hold onto exclusive rights to their work just because copyright grants those rights by default.

[TheDong]

Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

Red Hat certainly does package up a large collection of open source work and sell support for it, but that has not caused authors of open source software to despair and quit writing code. It is not common for a commercial entity to republish open source software, and Red Hat is an exception.

Sure, there are a vast number of open source developers who do it on the side, or are not compensated... but that is also true of professions where copyright remains. Most authors, most artists, they write or draw on the side, post their work to substack or twitter or deviant art or such, and never see a dime.

I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make, people are still creative, and a tiny fraction of people manage to make a profit off their passion projects.

[ssalazar]

Copyleft / GPL licenses require copyright law to have any threat of enforcement. Otherwise anyone could just ignore the terms of a copyleft license and use open source under any terms they wish.

[caconym_]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

[...]

> I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make [...]

I think this is a quite a stretch given the prominence of copyright in popular open source licenses, including (for example) the extremely popular and permissive MIT license. You can copy it, modify it, distribute it, etc., but I still own the copyright, and you still have to give me credit for the initial development. I can choose whatever license I want, which may or may not impose restrictions on who can use my code in derivative works, etc., and how.

In a very real sense, I do own the FOSS software I've released to the world. If legal codification of that ownership isn't important to open source developers, why are so many pixels spent discussing it?

[vel0city]

Free software/ open source licenses are copyright.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

And some of those licenses are being rethought by companies as they realize that that Amazon/Google/Microsoft can just take their work, put it on AWS as SAAS and capture most if not all of that value.

[mattnewton]

We ran that experiment of dramatically shorter copyright terms, and it produced much of the culture you know and love before 1975. Copyright has been extended in 1976 and then again in 1998 mostly at the behest of rent seeking corporations who bought the culture after it’s creation and after paying the authors handsomely for it. Calling Disney’s business “marginalized” seems ridiculous to me?

[caconym_]

See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688954

I'm advocating for copyright from the perspective of independent creators, not big media conglomerates. Additionally, my comment is (explicitly, if you read closely) addressing the case of copyright being completely dissolved, which---as crazy as this seems---is an idea some people apparently support. You need look no further than this thread to prove this to yourself.

I am not necessarily against shorter copyright terms. Honestly, since the main reason I support copyright is because it protects independent creators' rights to their own work, I would be totally fine with completely striking the postmortem copyright period for non-corporate authors (certainly, 70 years is insane) and cutting the pseudonymous/corporate terms in half.

[landryraccoon]

I think there's middle ground between "throw away all copyright protections" and "throw copyright infringers into prison for years".

I'm more inclined toward leniency than the draconian laws we have now.

I mean, 95 years of copyright protection? Is society really going to be destroyed if Disney has to release some of their IP under creative commons after 30 years instead? I doubt it.

[caconym_]

I don't really disagree with any of this. Big business has corrupted the modern implementation of copyright law (e.g. erosion of fair use) and something should be done to turn it back in favor of independent creators.

Of course, big money runs everything, so that probably isn't going to happen.

[svachalek]

I hate to say it but I think society is pretty full up on creativity these days. If the richest 1000 musicians stopped composing, would there be no music? Would it be worse than what we have now?

[bruce511]

>> Would it be worse than what we have now?

Point of view is everything. From at least one point of view the answer is yes.

Say I'm a small unsigned singer/songwriter, grinding along looking for a break. I write one good song. Elvis hears my song, and is free to just perform it himself. No copyright, no payment to me. His release is a smash hit, making him millions.

His performance of the song contributes a lot to his success, but the song itself is valuable too.

Of course elvis is signed by a record label, who pays him. The other record label buys one CD, and copies it (as they are entitled to do - no copyright remember.) they make millions selling it cheap (no need to spend on artists or marketing.) In fact they have a chain of stores where you can by any CD ever at half price.

So the real winner here is the person who sells to the customer, and pays not a penny upstream.

Musicians and song writers and audience builders upstream all work in construction doing their day job, and the cream of that crop can't afford to spend much time on creating. Their secret sauce is lost, and we are all poorer because of that.

Which personally, for me, sounds like a much worse system.

[mauvehaus]

On the basis of what's on the radio these days, I'd say that if the richest 1000 musicians quit composing, it might be a huge win.

[kelnos]

I think for smaller creators, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. While writing a song or story doesn't require much equipment cost, it does take a lot of time and effort, and that's time and effort that would be impossible to justify if the returns don't at least pay for food and housing.

But for big business media, it feels like the usual justification that rightsholders use for aggressive enforcement is that if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore. Which is technically true, but I don't think we've ever seen infringement on a level that would make these sorts of creations financially infeasible to make.

Actually, going back to small creators: it's not like current copyright terms are reasonable, anyway. I mean, let's say it takes you a year of full-time work to write a novel and get it published. So you could say that's a year of "lost" wages. Maybe copyright terms should be floating. As soon as the author recoups the "lost wages" plus some percent for creation-related expenses and profit, then it goes into the public domain. Why should creators (and often their descendants) get to milk their work for decades? I get that something like this would be a nightmare to handle legally, so maybe it makes sense to set a shorter copyright term based on some sort of average time to break even (or perhaps say 30th percentile or whatever, to make it more inclusive of some works that take longer). That's still difficult; I imagine you'd have to have different terms for different types of work. But it might be a lot more fair to the public commons.

Regardless, current terms for copyright are ridiculous: 95 years after publication, or 75 years after the death of the creator. I mean... what? That's nuts. Before Disney and Sonny Bono got greedy about all this, max term was less than 30 years, which sounds a lot more reasonable... though IMO still high! If the cost to create has gone down over time -- which for many types of creations I believe it has -- then copyright terms should be adjusted downward, not upward!

[hypertele-Xii]

> if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore

At current budgets. To make a movie all you need is a camera, and we pretty much all got one in our pockets at this point.

Someone will make movies sans copyright. It just won't be a massive, entrenched studio on a billion budget.

[kelnos]

Sure. To be clear, I'm not saying I buy the movie studios' rationale here; I'm merely pointing out what they often say.

I think a question we should also ask, though, is: is there artistic and entertainment value in massive-budget blockbuster films? I think yes, there is. I mean, I certainly enjoy plenty of them. But is that worth our current copyright regime? I would say no. But, like anything else, I expect the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. I don't think I would advocate for no copyright at all, but I would want it to be much more limited than it is now (even more limited than in the 90s, with 14+14-year terms, I'd say).

[_carbyau_]

Honestly? I do think that video and song writers are overrated for different reasons.

Movies. It isn't that they aren't worth what people pay to watch. But after ... say three to five years at most, it HAS entered Public Domain in a practical sense - just not legally... A more fun way to measure it, once you can stop using [spoiler alert] in a public forum about a movie, it is in the Public Domain.

Why a shorter period of time now? Availability. In the 1930's seeing a movie was tricky business compared to streaming on every device any time. Nowadays, after three years, anyone who really wants to see your movie has had sufficient time to do so.

Song Writers. Have you seen some of the lyrics they come up with? Teen Spirit for example. These are not literary masterpieces. But the performance is key. Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" did ok with her own performances, but blasted out of the park when Whitney Houston covered it. Yet Dolly made money for a song that had been out for 20 years? Damn, that's a good racquet if you have the connections - because song writing talent is only 5% of this equation. The performance, publicity around the movie etc etc made that happen.

As for - "but it will make it hard for creators to make money"

Yes, the future will be different. Not all people will be able to make money from art. But a large chunk of this of down to democratisation of tools. Just because you too have an Apple laptop and Garageband doesn't mean you should be able to make money.

Ultimately, all the people wanting to make big $ out of music are looking at the 60's-2000's time of music where corporations milked the scale of selling copies of music rather than performances. Now that bubble has popped.

Will your song be a masterpiece in a gallery earning you a lifetime of riches? Likely not. But that is the same for most painters in history.

[pronlover723]

Looking at the long list of credits of most recent effects heavy movies I don't think it's quite true that special effects are cheap. Sure, I get that anyone with enough motivation and Blender can making something cool. But at least at the moment, looking at any 3D movie or animated movie, it's 1000s of people for 1-3 years of work to make them. That's way way WAY UP from what it was 10-20-30 years ago.

[thayne]

Still, those movies are often profitable within a year or two, how much does society gain by the copyright lasting decades?

[_gabe_]

> Looking at the long list of credits of most recent effects heavy movies I don't think it's quite true that special effects are cheap.

>> You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago.

You can definitely do the same special effects that were available 10-20 years ago by yourself for free today. If you want to do special effects that match today's standards, yes that's going to be much harder. I don't think that's what the OP meant though. I think they were saying that what used to be very difficult and cost tons of money, can now be done by one person relatively cheaply or even for free.

[thayne]

How many of those 1000s of people will continue to benefit from the royalties years after the movie is made?

[redwall_hp]

None of the special effects artists, sound engineers, editors, costume designers or other associated professionals are getting royalties at all. They get paid for the work they do once and that's it. Actors get royalties, but if you're not one of the top names in the film, the checks will maybe buy a dinner out occasionally.

[pronlover723]

Not quite? The reason they have money to pay the salaries of special effects artists, sound engineers, editors, costume designers or other associated professionals is because of previous movie income.

[caconym_]

> Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don't have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don't need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.

You should take a look at the Wikipedia list of the most expensive films, inflation-adjusted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#M...

There are a lot of problems with your comment (are impressive special effects the only thing you need to make an "impactful" movie or television show? can you show your work to prove your claim that music, film, and television today are less "impactful" than in the past?) but I think this is the most obvious one: we are, evidently, spending more to make blockbuster movies today than we ever have before. This would seem to put your "faster and easier" claim on very shaky ground.

[imron]

> You should take a look at the Wikipedia list of the most expensive films, inflation-adjusted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#M...

How on earth is Tangled #9 on this list?

[chevill]

IIRC development hell. I think they had to scrap basically the whole movie and start over at one point.

[imron]

That it cost more than Avatar (released around the same time) in both actual and adjusted costs is staggering .

[Retric]

Many of those most expensive films spent much of their budgets on major actors. That’s a function of Hollywood accounting where actors need to be paid upfront for the potential value of the income generated rather than paid based on how well a film does.

The most expensive film on that list Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) out of a nominal 378.5 million paid $55 Million for Jonny Depp. Orlando Bloom made 11 million on that same film etc.

By comparison Orlando Bloom made got $175,000 For The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and 21 million for the Hobbit trilogy.

[caconym_]

> Many of those most expensive films spent much of their budgets on major actors. That’s a function of Hollywood accounting where actors need to be paid upfront for the potential value of the income generated rather than paid based on how well a film does.

A brief Google safari suggests that while this may sometimes be the case, it's far from universal, and can't really account for the overwhelming trend of recent films appearing on the list I posted.

So where's the source? Where's the inflation-adjusted budget breakdown equivalent of what I posted?

Relevant Wiki page with a handful of budget breakdowns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_budgeting

[Retric]

The budget breakdown you just linked is fine for what I am describing.

The logic here is a little strange but it does explain why more recent movies especially sequels dominate that list. More recent films have larger audiences due to population growth and ticket prices have kept up with inflation. That means more recent films have a larger likely revenue stream especially sequels for popular movies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films EX: Ben-Hur the most expensive movie that had been made in 1959 at the equivalent of 158 million and pulled in the equivalent of 900 million would hardly worth mentioning as a major film today.

Actors/directors/screenwriters/music rights holders/etc are going to negotiate based on the potential revenues therefore the larger the potential revenue the more they want to be paid upfront.

Now, that doesn’t directly impact shooting or special effects budgets, but if you’re already spending 100+ million on the “Actors/directors/screenwriters/music rights holders/etc” then there is little reason to economize on the special effects budget. Trying to economize at that point is just not worth the risk especially when the budget is fixed before you start. Might as well keep things padded at that point.

[toss1]

I used to think that patents were essential, but the reality is that they don't provide much protection to ordinary inventors and are mostly used in rent-seeking and extractive behaviors by major entities.

The reality is that a patent or copyright is not a protection, but just a ticket to a lawsuit. That lawsuit will take years and 6-figure dollars to prosecute to a usually unsatisfactory result. When it costs well into 5-figure dollars merely to get a patent, it's not worth it for a small inventor and is just the cost of business for a patent troll.

Other than marketing value of "we have 5 patents on the tech in this product!", it's generally better to go trade secret, IMO...

Copyright, is better in that it doesn't cost much to assert one, but going beyond a decade or two after the life of the author is again only something that favors some large corporate entities.

Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation. Promoting large corporations rent-seeking and extractive profits fails to do that.

[bruce511]

>> Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation

This is inaccurate. Patents are designed to promote innovation.

Copyrights are designed to promote creativity, not innovation. My novel is not innovative, it is creative. Copyrights allow me to monetize my creations if I choose to do so.

Patents are designed for people to monetize invention.

Conflating the two is both common, and unhelpful, as they both need different reforms in different aspects.

[toss1]

Of course they are distinct and need somewhat different reforms.

However, they have much more in common

They are both legal structures creating and enforcing the concept of "intellectual property" and supporting monetization of that property for the creators.

I read the phrase "promote creativity" as indistinguishable from "promote innovation in the non-STEM (artistic, literary, etc.) fields" — sure, in general, "innovative" connotations differing from "creative", but in this discussion, it is a distinction without a difference.

Maybe I'm missing something, and I agree that they both need reforms in different aspects, but that is primarily because they have different sets of laws, not because of some distinction between the two words you've highlighted.

[bruce511]

"Intellectual Property" as a term covers more than monetization though. For example it covers Trade Marks which has more to do with ownership (ie a "brand") than with direct monetization. I don't sell my trademark.

The distinction is important because one can be pro, or against, monetization - for or against ownership, pro or against copyright and so on. Incidentally copyright isn't as much about monetization (almost no creative works make any money) - it's more about control over the creation.

>> I read the phrase "promote creativity" as indistinguishable from "promote innovation in the non-STEM (artistic, literary, etc.) fields"

I understand where you are coming from, but I would argue that there's a big difference between innovation and creativity, and conflating the two does not necessarily lead to progress in reforming either.

[toss1]

>>"Intellectual Property" as a term covers more than monetization though. For example it covers Trade Marks which has more to do with ownership (ie a "brand") than with direct monetization. I don't sell my trademark.

Interesting example, but it is still all about monetization, even if slightly indirect. E.g., every franchise operation licenses it's trademark to it's operators - You and I can setup a hamburger restaurant, but we'd better not call it McDonald's or Wendy's without signing up to their franchise agreement and paying the fees.

I've worked in both software and now in mechanical engineering fields, and I'm also having a hard time seeing both how innovation is not merely creativity applied to one field and the arts are creativity applied to another. Whether I'm creating a new widget, or way to make the widget, or you are creating a new painting, song, or written work, we're both applying our training, knowledge, experience, and creativity to create something new.

Even more so, I don't see how making this distinction inhibits making reforms.

In both cases, we need to reform the system so that it is not merely a tool for corporations to implement restrictive rent-seeking regimes to extract profit and inhibit progress. Any further detail you can provide?

[hovden]

Physical property and intellectual property are fundamentally different legally and philosophically. The terminology causes much confusion, especially among those with classical liberal leanings.

https://c4sif.org/2022/01/natural-rights-scarcity-intellectu...

[pas]

sorry, could you somehow summarize it?

[adamhi]

As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement.

With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone.

Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.

[readbeard]

Re: "intellectual property" and "piracy," I agree. The terms are problematic and misleading. How about "intellectual monopoly" and "infringement" as more accurate, neutral terms?

[bruce511]

The concept of "intellectual property", which is a blanket term to include trade marks, copyright, patents, trade secrets and more is unhelpful because this covers multiple parts of the law, which were developed independently with different goals.

While there is a lot of good in there, (not much complaint about trademarks), some mixed (copyright is good, 95 years is excessive), some bad (software patents) it's very mixed, and so lumping it all together as "intellectual property" is unhelpful. If for no other reason than it is too broad a topic that is too easily distracted to get anything resolved.

[0dayz]

Ive always been in favor of the idea that only a person(s) can hold said copyright or patent and not the company, instead the company can have a license that protects their specific version of said work.

[ChadNauseam]

How would you fund things like the discovery of new drugs, or the creation of big-budget movies, without parents and copyright respectively?

[zozbot234]

New drugs are one thing (though even there, prizes and academic grants are a meaningful alternative to patent protection), but do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Most of them have trouble ever making a profit, and that's in spite of extreme levels of copyright enforcement (at least wrt. average users, not dedicated pirates).

[dahart]

> Most of them have trouble ever making a profit

If that were true, most of the big-budget movie studios would be going out of business regularly. But that isn’t happening, by and large. They do sometimes want you to think they’re not making money. Having worked in the film & games industries, I’ve witnessed some of the creative accounting that gets used.

> do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste.

Well, people pay for them, and our IP laws are designed to protect the business of creations and inventions. Most of the pharma industry is also peddling stuff we don’t need and is wasteful, however it is big business.

[rpdillon]

They do make some money!

> Here are the combined financial figures for all 29 Hollywood blockbusters (budgeted over $100m)…

> Total combined budgets: $4.37 billion

> Total combined costs (including budgets, marketing and all other costs): $11.52 billion

> Total combined income (from all revenue streams): $11.95 billion

> Profit across all movies: $428.9 million

> An average profit of $14.8 million per movie

The whole thing is an interesting read!

https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-b...

[dahart]

It is interesting, but should be taken with a couple pretty big grains of salt IMO. It does a good job of discussing the many varied sources of cost and income. But the secret unsourced data of unnamed movies that is “trust me” better than what’s on Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo… really big red flag. I absolutely do not buy that the average profit is 3.7%. I worked on one of the movies he discusses (Shrek 2) and the paragraph about it is misleading, which for me makes me wonder how many other paragraphs are misleading. I also worked for a 2nd major film company and watched first-hand how they account for production budgets, which can involve trading costs with other nearby productions to make the expenses appear larger in order to do things like justify restructuring decisions, hide gains and losses, divert money toward or away from bonus pools. What really happens is impossible to know even as an insider, but the outcomes of this industry reveal that despite what they claim, it’s quite healthy for the big-budget crowd.

[bruce511]

It's worth understanding that "profit" is usually not the goal, and in any business can be easily made to go higher or lower.

For example if I want my business to make more profit, I can stop paying me a salary. I can just take the same money out as profit. Or vice versa. Ultimately I end up optimising my salary/profit ratio according to the tax laws.

Notice the studios managed to spend 8 billion on "other stuff". That's not "profit" (so less to pay people who have profit share) but it certainly went somewhere. And those feeding at the $8b trough certainly view big budget movies as a massive win.

Sure Hollywood Accounting is well known, but it's no different to any business. Profit is a meaningless number and ultimately the flow of money is optimised for many other things.

[npteljes]

>Most of them have trouble ever making a profit

They just do the accounting in a specific way to reduce taxes. It's on such a scale that it has its own name: Hollywood accounting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

[concordDance]

If you abolished patents you'd have to reduce regulations on drug discovery enough that university teams can make new ones (like in the bad old days of the 1950s). Big budget movies we can just do without.

On a related note: If you reduce the regulations on drugs you could go back to the good old days where new drugs cost under a hundred million dollars to make. This would let smaller companies make new drugs and drug companies would get slightly less insane margins (your average big pharma company gets $2 for shareholders for every $1 they spend on R&D, manufacturing, admin, advertising, etc).

[andi999]

A few more people might get damages from that, so lets hope they are in different countries /s

[jerojero]

Lots and I really do mean lots of drugs are funded almost entirely by governments and basic research at universities. Covid vaccines being one example.

If you look at where the money for research comes (for new drugs, not for variation of existing drugs) from in big pharma you'll see a significant part of it is government money.

But ethically do you think it is okay for big pharma to keep the intellectual property on medicine that can very well save lives? I think you have to make a very good case for patents being a force of innovation to justify keeping this medicine out of peoples reach. Let's not forget when bill gates spent millions of dollars distributing information in Africa against the copyright waiver the government was planning in order to make AIDS medicine affordable. Rent seeking on medication is, in my opinion, one of the worst use cases for copyright.

And then, from there, isn't access to culture also a human right? Personally I think it is. Of course in our current societal and economic system it is extremely punishing to be an artist. But to me, that indicates there is something wrong with our system when artists have to rent seek or starve! We do have to question the basis of what makes our society tick more carefully. There are always trade offs, but I think the direction we've taken... The direction of strenghtening rent seeking behavior is probably at odds with creativity and freedom of expression.

I mean, look at "memes". These images with funny text that people make. These are often anonymous pieces of work that are meant to be copied and distributed for free! I think the proliferation of talent and artwork is related to the disruption of access rather than copyright. Look at the amount of free work that is produced on the internet, from tiktok to memes to fanfiction. 60 years ago it took a lot to be a writer, publishing was very expensive so of course there needed to be a system to support that. But that's no longer the case, the internet gives you a way to reach millions of people instantly. Anything that can be digitalized is on a whole other level now.

So to me, the cost of maintaining copyright has to be put in the balance with its benefits... And I'm not sure we wouldnt see big budget productions without it. I mean, wasnt game of thrones the most pirated show ever anyway?

[shakes_mcjunkie]

Isn't it also just generally impossible to say if a sale was lost because of piracy? A pirated copy may never have actually been a sale and how would anyone know?

[vanderZwan]

A lot of early studies on piracy suggested that it actually promotes sales more than it removes them. It's just that this is mainly on the side of the less famous musicians, artists, etc, because it gives them more reach (in the case of music people were less likely to try out their stuff if they only had a limited budget to buy records and little opportunity to listen to albums beforehand). It's mainly the biggest mainstream acts that see reduced sales.

Personally I don't have much of an issue with that. Of course, this was before streaming was a thing so who knows if the effects of piracy on sales have shifted again as a result of that.

And then there is of course the angle that we're artificially limiting supply of digital goods anyway, but that's an entirely different can of worms.

[thrdbndndn]

The flip side of this is that sometimes copyright owner may not even care about sales, they simply don't want people to get their work for free.

Of course it's almost never the case for large companies which are profit driven, but I once saw an indie Japanese artist said things similar to (when reacting to his work being pirated) that (paraphrasing) "I didn't care if it helps promote my work or the fact I won't lose sales anyway (since I don't sell my work overseas); I just found it's not fair for people who actually paid".

I personally is still on the fence, but his comment did make me think.

[jonny_eh]

You could say the same of a stolen DVD. Would the thief have otherwise paid for the DVD? At least in the case of a physical good, you could argue that the item being stolen "may" have prevented someone else from buying it, but even then there's no guarantee.

[tshaddox]

That's a totally different, much simpler question. A stolen DVD is very clearly a reduction in the number of DVDs the seller can possibly sell.

[jraph]

Devil's advocate, it's not that simple. Producing a DVD is cheap, the seller can produce them for almost nothing per unit (not zero though).

It could be that this stolen DVD allows N people to discover its content and buy the DVD. The seller wins from this stealing even for a small N. N could be bigger than when downloading the movie instead, because the DVD can be seen in a shelf for example.

Is it fundamentally different? (it's a genuine question, I have not studied anything on the matter).

The only difference I see is that almost nothing = zero when downloading the DVD's content instead of stealing the physical object.

edit: I actually see a difference, there's no guarantee that a stolen DVD does produce any sale, and so there is a loss even if it is small, but I think the question is still not simple to answer.

[tshaddox]

> Producing a DVD is cheap, the seller can produce them for almost nothing per unit (not zero though).

That's true, although I was thinking more about retailers who presumably pay much more than the marginal cost (though still much less than the retail price). It's also probably true that copyright laws are responsible for the vast majority of the commercial value of physical copies of digital media. Perhaps an easier way to see the fundamental difference is that when you're downloading a copy of a movie from BitTorrent, all the parties actively involved are willing participants.

> It could be that this stolen DVD allows N people to discover its content and buy the DVD.

This is also a real possibility, and is a strong argument for copyright holders to rethink their business models (and, in my view, for societies to rethink copyright laws). But I don't think it's a strong argument for treating the theft of a physical DVD and someone torrenting a movie as being remotely comparable.

[gridspy]

It is possible that movie (DVD, Blueray) sales are similar to book sales. The stock is only paid for when it is actually sold. That allows shops to hold huge stock on day 1 with less financial risk and also to price-match all other shops regardless on when they received their stocks.

[Dylan16807]

By the time the DVD is licensed and produced and shipped and put on a shelf taking up space, that's most of the price tag accounted for.

Even if you used the wholesale price for theft, it wouldn't make a big difference. There's a real burden there that's very close to a lost sale even if it's not actually a lost sale.

With piracy none of those costs exist, and any costs that do exist are paid for by the pirate.

[WWLink]

How about buying a preowned DVD? If we decide that what you're paying for is the entertainment and joy of watching a movie, are we not stealing from the content creators by reselling and purchasing used DVDs?

Edit: I'm making it clear I absolutely despise this argument of course :D Being able to buy/sell used physical media is my favorite reason to buy physical and never buy digital.

[shakes_mcjunkie]

I'm sure there are many owners out there that hate the fact physical media is resellable. I'm sure this is at least part of the reason everything is becoming more restricted by copy protection, streamed, proprietary downloads, etc. Everything is becoming harder to own and share without "pirating".

[bee_rider]

A stolen DVD seems more likely to be a lost sale, than an unauthorized digital copy. The person stealing the DVD has gone there in person and is willing to risk a possible interaction with staff/security. So they probably want the DVD, and would buy it otherwise. The person who downloads the movie might just be randomly browsing and not really all that interested otherwise.

[thaumasiotes]

> A stolen DVD is very clearly a reduction in the number of DVDs the seller can possibly sell.

But that's not true; you would have to assume that the number of DVDs the vendor orders is independent of the number of DVDs the vendor loses to all forces including both sales and theft. That assumption is obviously false. If you run a store, you're not limited to ordering a single shipment of whatever DVD; if it sells well, you can order additional shipments.

[fcsp]

Not if it's stolen from a person who bought it, instead of a warehouse

[ntoskrnl]

If I steal 50 Disney DVDs from a store (and they aren't recovered by the police) the store's insurance will reimburse the store for the loss, and then the store will order more DVDs to refill their stock. Disney actually comes out ahead in that case, believe it or not

[entropicdrifter]

And in the case of the stolen DVD, the DVD is physically gone from where it was. In the case of digital copies, nothing is lost besides the potential for one particular sale.

[duped]

If the DVD was taking up shelf space and no one was buying it the thief might actually be saving them money

[jonny_eh]

> If the DVD was taking up shelf space

I think in 2022, that's true of most DVDs.

[lmm]

The damages are at least the wholesale price of the DVD (probably half the consumer price) in that case. With piracy that becomes harder because the marginal cost is zero.

[midasuni]

In many cases copyright infringement doesn’t result in a lost sale. If the copyright holder refuses to sell the product, then surely the damages are zero.

The majority of copyrighted material is not available for purchase

[ksec]

> I know it's not a popular opinion

Not sure where you get that idea, HN is pretty much Anti Patents and Copyright regardless of its merit, if there are even any from their perspective.

[Asooka]

Over time I have honestly went from "Copyright must be reigned in" to "Copyright must be abolished". Some limited kind of author's rights should remain, but copyright itself seems to have an entirely negative utility.

[esaym]

Copyright violations can be equally bad: https://www.eff.org/cases/capitol-v-thomas

[fxtentacle]

Well in this case, we're talking about a industry espionage and modchip crew that has been around since the first Xbox. I personally know people who used their products and (as the result) never ever purchased a game that they played. So my experience would suggest that Xecutor modchips were really popular. I'm pretty sure $65m is a rather conservative estimate of the lost sales that they caused.

[p1necone]

There have been periods of my life where I pirated almost every game I played. If it wasn't for piracy... I wouldn't have bought any games, because I didn't have any money to spend on them.

Then Steam and Actually Having a Job happened and I didn't do that any more.

I still pirate games, but it's only ones that aren't being sold any more, so I don't see who's missing out there.

[indrora]

Gabe Newell was absolutely right when he made it clear that piracy was a demand being unmet.

I suspect part of the Steam Summer Sales being as deep as they are is to give a chance for people who can't afford AAA games normally to have a way to snag them at 80-90% off. A big AAA title makes the majority of its money in the first few months of sale, then fucks off for the rest of its lifetime, so doing deep cuts in the summer makes it profitable through volume.

[johnwalkr]

I like to buy them at about 50% off, and forget about them until I try to buy them again at 90% and remember that I already own it and haven’t even downloaded it yet.

[RajT88]

I will say, I knew many who were similar.

If they pirated 100 games, maybe they would have bought a handful at retail price, even given unlimited funds. A few more on discount.

Anecdata, sure. But it speaks to the point that game pirates don't really play the vast majority of what they pirate, they try them out a bit and move on mainly because the time cost is virtually nil.

[shakes_mcjunkie]

If the chips didn't exist though would they have actually bought every one of those games? Would they have bought the console? I doubt this is information that could actually be gathered and calculated accurately as damages.

[fxtentacle]

There's likely millions of people in a situation like me. If each of them only didn't buy one single $60 game because of the modchip, then that sums up to $60 mio.

I agree that pirated copy != lost sale. But if you play 20+ games and buy 0, I'm pretty sure without modchip it would even out at maybe buy+play 5 games. Plus there's games like the Zelda series that every hardcore fan will play. So for those games, I think it is fair to assume 50% of piracy would have been a lost sale.

And lastly, how do you know that people didn't "buy" their cracked games? When I was traveling Asia, you could buy a modchipped Switch and bootlegged games in the same store. So then you still pay $5 for a new Switch game, it's just that the money goes to some Chinese counterfeit group, not to Nintendo.

[BiteCode_dev]

> There's likely millions of people in a situation like me

Unlikely. Most console users don't even know what modding mean, and among the few that do, fewer even make the step to do it. It's not trivial.

It's very niche, at least in the occidental markets.

[gowld]

> But if you play 20+ games and buy 0, I'm pretty sure without modchip it would even out at maybe buy+play 5 games.

This is absolutely absurd.

Look at the modern internet. "Free" is consumed at rates far more than 4x of "paid equivalents that existed before the free option".

[AussieWog93]

>This is absolutely absurd.

Really?

It sounds pretty much right to me. Consoles have a typical tie ratio of around 8-10 games, and people who mod their systems (who, if anything, would skew towards people who would otherwise buy _more_ games) typically buy zero.

[waffleiron]

But people who mod their system might never have bought the system if that option wasn't available.

[Phrodo_00]

> I personally know people who used their products and (as the result) never ever purchased a game that they played.

On the other hand, in some markets, consoles only become an option after they're unlocked and can't get any penetration without that.